• Aldrond@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Although high in nutrients, the difficulty in digestion makes it a carciogen. Particularly red meat - bird and fish (pre omnipresent plastics and heavy metals) are relatively healthier.

      • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        That’s sorta half the story. The official statement is that consistently eating more than 1.5lbs (500g) of red meat per week “probably” (their word) increases your cancer risk. The real story is that eating more than 50g of processed meat per week dramatically increases your cancer risk. To the extent that processed meat is ranked as a “Group 1” carcinogen.

        Flip-side, grains and legumes have been tied to cancer as well. I can’t find exactly what category, but they seem fairly convinced they are carcinogenic.

        It is, sadly, like the California Cancer joke, where almost everything causes cancer if taken to excess.

      • psud@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If it is hard to digest meat, why do carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores?

        • Aldrond@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          “Hard” doesn’t necessarily mean “requiring many resources” in this case. It has more nutrients, and as such it’s usually not digested as fully as herbivores digest plant matter.

          It’s harder on the system doing the digestion.

          • psud@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I’m not getting it. Meat is hard to digest, but you can do it with a short gut, and produces very little excretion (the military “low residue diet” is meaty and low in fibre)

            But vegetables are easy, yet take a longer gut and produce enormous amounts of shit

            There’s nothing about difficulty in digestion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Nutritional_information

            Have you got a source - ideally one not produced by a vegan or vegetarian source?

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I think it’s more the industrial farming and food processing practices that make it carcinogenic.

        • Aldrond@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s not. Remember that evolutionary incentives don’t care if you tend to live very far fast 32.

          • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            It actually is. Most carcinogenic evidence on meats come from processed meats. Per cited references, eating way too much red meat is “probably” a cause for cancer, but eating processed meats is definitely a cause for cancer.

            And by way too much, 1.5lbs/week. I love a good steak, but don’t really eat 1.5lbs/week of it.

    • psud@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Since the grain industry gained power in the 1940s. They funded much research to say

      1. Meat is hard to digest (when in fact carnivorous animals have the shortest gut; we’re omnivores and have a medium gut, we also have the most acidic stomach acid of the mammals which is an adaptation to eating meat)
      2. Grain is the healthiest food (the only type of animal that does well on seeds is birds, they don’t have teeth for bread to get stuck between and rot. The ancient Egyptians lived on bread and had the worst dental health)
      3. That humans need a balanced diet of many different things - which we do when we’re eating nutritionally poor foods like bread, but many thrive on simple diets of fatty meat (Inuit before they adopted the standard American diet; Buffalo hunting native Americans; modern followers of lion, carnivore, zero carb)

      The standard diet as recommended by science (much of which was bought by the wheat peak bodies) has made us fat. Getting fatter is the most unhealthy state, it leads to diabetes, hypertension, bad cholesterol and early death

    • Hextic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Fr meat is the reason we have big brain.

      Now if you wanna argue that we should have never left the trees and created civilization then you may have a point.

      • Cralder@feddit.nu
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        1 year ago

        The dose is the poison. Meat in the amount we consume today is unhealthy. In the past people didn’t eat meat every day or even close to it.

        • toxic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That doesn’t inherently make it unhealthy. We have the means to not have to eat the animals we slaughter immediately due to refrigeration.

          • docmark@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The frequency and serving sizes are what make it unhealthy. Couple with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and one of the best/easiest decisions you can make to improve your health is to cut back on meat, especially processed meat products. Proccessed meat is definitely, 100% unhealthier than cuts from your local butcher.

            • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Processed meat is a Group 1 carcinogen. We should be treating it like we treat cigarettes.

            • toxic@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Yes, but all these points were not mentioned by the user I’m responding to. He stated that our ancestors didn’t eat meat as frequently as we do now. That was his argument against red meat.